VIDEO
20 Signs Of The Staggering Decline Of The American Middle Class Family
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHc3TS2JFzU
We just got more evidence that the middle class is being systematically destroyed in America. At this point, millions of people out there have already grown accustomed to barely scraping by from month to month. But that is not what being “middle class” is supposed to be about. Middle-class families should be able to make more money than they have to spend on everyday necessities because is only by doing so that they can build long-term wealth. Unfortunately, income growth has not kept up with the pace of the rising cost of living, and millions of households have taken massive amounts of debt. At the same time, the labor market doesn't offer good-paying jobs that support middle-class life, and the lack of these positions has been contributing to the decline of this income group all across the country. In the early 1970s, the middle class accounted for around 60 percent of the population, but now middle-income households are rapidly becoming a minority in the United States. And as economic conditions continue to deteriorate, millions of hard-working families all over America are being stretched financially like never before. “In America, the middle class can no longer afford retirement. Middle-class Americans face sharp economic inequality, with ownership of financial assets highly concentrated among the wealthy,” explained Tyler Bond, NIRS research manager. “Now that we have a retirement system largely built around the individual ownership of financial assets in 401(k) accounts, middle-class Americans are struggling to accumulate sufficient financial assets during their working years. This means the retirement outlook for many in the middle class is bleak at best.” Since the onset of the health crisis, the U.S. economy has been decaying at an alarming pace. Over the past two years, the middle class has gotten smaller and smaller in this country, and now it seems that another economic downturn is upon us once again. So many families are already living on the edge right now. Recent surveys have exposed that well over 50% of the population is living paycheck to paycheck and that most Americans don't have emergency savings or a financial cushion to fall back on. When you are living on the edge, there is always a danger that you could fall over. Since 2020, we have never seen so many middle-class Americans falling straight into poverty. In other words, unless dramatic changes happen in America, the middle class is going to be absolutely eviscerated in the next decade. We must wake up now. The middle class is dying right before our eyes, and if we want to save it, we must take action now. Today, we compiled a series of new numbers that expose the rapid downfall of the U.S. middle-class.
VIDEOS:
It's Too Late To Stop This Now, Get Your House In Order
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u7173SPBF8
15 Signs That The Social Decay In America Is Worse Than It Has Ever Been Before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDTdgIJcoD8
The social fabric of the United States is rapidly deteriorating. Right now, virtually any measure of social welfare is showing us that social decay in America is accelerating at a very shocking pace. Our main institutions are either being dismantled or falling apart. At the same time, civil disorder continues to trigger unprecedented chaos in several parts of our country. Millions of Americans don't have access to proper housing, food, and education, and the gap between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' has never been wider. The lack of proper education to help Americans thrive and accomplish financial stability is another sign of societal breakdown. Most colleges and universities are failing in one of their most basic missions: to equip students with the tools they need for a career. Millions of students graduate each year totally ill-prepared to earn a living and pay off the debt they’ve accumulated getting their degrees — at least 40% of those who start college don’t finish within six years. Despite these problems, colleges continue to raise tuition and to pay for these ever-increasing costs, students are borrowing more money and taking on more and more debt. And with federal loans accounting for much of the $1.5 trillion in outstanding student loan debt, and more than a million people defaulting on their loans, taxpayers are picking up much of the tab for this broken system while our younger generations remain utterly unprepared for the challenges of adult life. In the world’s wealthiest country, more and more people are living on the streets. Homelessness is a significant indicator of social decay. There are 750,000 Americans who are homeless on any given night, with one in five of them considered chronically homeless. Around 70% of the homeless are individuals, and families with children make up for the remaining 30%. Living without proper access to housing puts many people in very a vulnerable position, oftentimes, their lives are at risk. An examination of 20 US urban areas found that around 13,000 homeless people are victimized by disease, extreme weather, and substance abuse every year. The number of victims shot up by 77% in the five years ending in 2020. Today, the average life expectancy of a homeless person in America is just 50 years. There will be no future for us if we stay on this highly self-destructive path. The choices that we make individually and collectively as a nation are critical for the health of our society. Throughout all human history, great empires have fallen because societies have consistently made the wrong choices. So if we want to prevent the downfall of America, we must start making better choices. But if we are going to change direction, we better start doing it now because time is running out, and it won’t be too long before it is gone completely. Today, we decided to expose some worrying facts about the social breakdown happening all around us.
VIDEOS:
Why New York’s Billionaires’ Row Is Half Empty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wehsz38P74g&t=1439s
15 Signs That America Is In Much Worse Trouble Than We All Thought
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bafVveN1qlc
Today, we brought you some numbers that may be hard to digest. Even though most of us know by now that America is in trouble, many people out there don't have any idea of how deep in trouble we really are. Offense rates are shooting up tremendously right now. As the cost of basic necessities escalates, more people are stealing to feed themselves today than in any other period in the past decade. Gas theft rates are skyrocketing, as prices rise above the $5-dollar-mark. Since January, the number of carjackings has gone up by over 300% in some cities. Officers say that it's not just a few gallons being siphoned from vehicles. Now, thieves are pumping thousands of dollars' worth of fuel from gas stations and selling it for a profit. CNN reported that, in Orlando, Florida, authorities are looking for two people who they say stole more than 1,000 gallons of fuel from a gas station. In Las Vegas, Nevada, highly modified vehicles are being used to steal tens of thousands of gallons from local gas stations. And in Greenville, South Carolina, several arrests for gas thefts have been made since January. Last week, in North Carolina last week, almost 400 gallons of gas were stolen by thieves who were able to bypass the payment system. The list goes on and on, and given that gas prices are expected to continue to rise, we’re going to see many more similar cases happening until the end of the year.
Meanwhile, on dividedness, the U.S. ranks No. 1. A Pew Research Center Survey of 20 developed nations found that Americans were the most likely to say their society was split along partisan, racial, and ethnic lines. The U.S. also reported more religious division than almost any other country surveyed. The truth is that our country is rapidly falling apart. Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the U.S. has skyrocketed, leaving many Americans living paycheck to paycheck while the nation’s top earners hoard all the gains from economic growth. It's actually been 11 years since the last federal minimum wage hike, the longest span the baseline wage has gone without an increase since it began in 1938. Since the last federal minimum wage hike — to $7.25 an hour, starting July 24, 2009 — the cost of living has shot up by 20%, while the price of essentials such as housing and health care have increased even faster. The average rent back in 2009 was about $1,132, adjusted for inflation. On top of all that, the U.S. manufacturing sector is facing a historic slowdown right now, which is quite alarming given that about 12% of the nation’s total output comes from manufacturing. And the supply chain disruptions we’ve seen so far are just a hint of the chaos we are going to witness this year. As we enter peak shipping season, shipping information company Frieghtos estimates that by August the price to ship one 40-ft container from China to the US East Coast will shoot up to more than $20,000, almost twice as high as shipping rates were in January, and a 500% increase from 2019 levels. Our living standards are decaying and, at this point, we all can see our quality of life evaporating right before our eyes. That's why we compiled some sobering statistics that reveal that the crises we're facing are far more severe than most of us imagine. For more info, find us on: https://www.epiceconomist.com/ And visit: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/
AMERICA IS A NATION FOR THE RICH AND 'CHEAP' ILLEGAL LABOR THAT THE RICH DEMAND
25 Facts About The Explosive Growth Of Poverty In America That Will Blow Your Mind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANm7FAKuCw0
The rest of the world sees America as the wealthiest nation on the entire planet. But when we take a closer look at the hardships our population is facing, we can rapidly realize that there's a tremendous amount of financial suffering in the United States, and that's getting dramatically worse with each passing year. Today, more money goes towards the pockets of the rich than ever before. Over the past few decades, we've been witnessing the greatest event of wealth transfer in the history of our nation without even realizing it. While billionaire CEOs like Mark Zuckenberg make over a million times more than the average American worker every year, many families out there, whose parents work themselves to the bone every single day, will still struggle to find what to eat and where to sleep with their children tonight. Extreme poverty continues to grow all across the country. According to an analysis released by the University of Chicago, at least 336,000 households with children live on less than two dollars a day. That’s a group known as the ultra-poor. Amid skyrocketing housing and rent prices, at least 600,000 Americans remain in a group known as the “unhoused”. “Right now, we are still trending in the wrong direction,” explained Anthony Love, interim executive director at the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. “When the public is told that one particular policy is going to end homelessness, what they’re expecting is that they’re going to see fewer homeless people around,” added Stephen Eide, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. What they haven’t considered yet is that housing has to come first, Eide stressed. Meanwhile, the gap between the rich and the rest of the population is worsening. On average, the top 1% of earners make 20 times more than the bottom 90% every year. The wealth disparity grows the higher up the ladder we climb. Even the mid-level one-percenters can’t reach the gigantic amounts earned by the ultra-rich. These disparities, make us question whether the US is indeed a rich nation or a nation for the rich. The answer is up to interpretation, but you can have a clearer picture about this issue at the end of this video. Today, we gathered some staggering stats that expose that poverty in the United States is wildly out of control. Here are 25 Facts About The Explosive Growth Of Poverty In America That Will Blow Your Mind. For more info, find us on: https://www.epiceconomist.com/
15 Facts That Show Rising Prices Are Absolutely Eviscerating America’s Shrinking
Middle Class
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb_1NSFYpgY
The United States used to have the largest and strongest middle class in the entire world... but those times are long gone. Now, the American middle class is rapidly shrinking, and the current economic conditions are accelerating that process even further. We've never seen prices reach stratospheric levels so rapidly, and a series of economic trends show that this is just the beginning. Amid soaring prices for virtually everything, consumer sentiment plunged again last month, hitting its lowest level since August 2011, according to the University of Michigan. At this point, two-thirds of Americans say higher prices have been difficult or even a hardship, and they’re now forcing many to make cutbacks.
According to Laura Wronski, the senior manager of research science at Momentive, “people making six-figure incomes are almost as worried about inflation as people making half as much —and they are just as likely to be taking steps to mitigate its effect on their lives. Inflation is a problem that compounds over time, and even middle and upper-income individuals won’t be insulated from the second and third-order effects of price increases,” she said. A new study by Wells Fargo discovered that the middle class is getting more financially squeezed by rampant prices than any other income group in the United States. And it is going to get “worse before it gets better,” according to Moody’s Analytics. Meanwhile, home prices are absolutely exploding. Over the past two years, they went up by a staggering 32.6%. The latest jump in mortgage rates has effectively put homebuyers in the worst position since 2007.
At the same time, most people are barely scraping by from month to month, and the meteoric rise in the price of consumer goods is certainly not helping matters. And if you think things are bad right now, in a couple of months, they could be a whole lot worse. Even the White House is warning that consumers should brace for some painful price hikes in the coming weeks and months.
It’s getting harder and harder for millions of middle-class families to keep their heads above the water as inflation eats up a larger share of their monthly incomes. That's compromising the purchasing power of hard-working Americans who dedicate their lives to building a comfortable lifestyle. As the price of everything reaches new record-highs, this situation is rapidly becoming unsustainable.
We’re on the verge of another economic recession, and all of the facts we share with you in this video are proof of that. Americans have never experienced so much financial suffering since the 2008 Great Recession and the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Unfortunately, as we're being told, a lot more pain is ahead, and given that our leaders continue to overlook our worsening problems, we should start doing whatever we can to protect ourselves and our families from the coming chaos because it is crystal clear now that we're on our own. That's why today, we compiled several stats that uncover the distressing effect of soaring prices in the lives of millions of middle-class families all across the country. Here are 15 Facts That Show Rising Prices Are Absolutely Eviscerating America’s Shrinking Middle Class.
For more info, find us on: https://www.epiceconomist.com/ And visit: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/
Economic Update: Capitalism & Its Self-Delusions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbdJ-LuVZqI
In the first half of this week's show, Wolff evaluates US capitalism as a system of production and distribution of goods and services. In the second half, he compares the evaluation with the very different self-image of dominant voices within US capitalism. His conclusion: US capitalism has peaked and finding it very difficult to face its decline. **Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff is@Democracy At Work production. We make it a point to provide the show free of ads. Please consider supporting our work. Become an EU patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/economicupdate and help us spread Prof. Wolff's message to a larger audience. Every donation counts!
20 Signs That American Families Are Being Economically Destroyed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN9pMwQEKog
The systematic destruction of the American way of life is happening all around us. But still, most part of our population has no idea what is happening. Once upon a time in America, if you worked hard and managed your spending, you could support a middle-class lifestyle for your entire family with one good-paying job, even if you only had a high school education. We can't say that things were perfect, but back then almost everyone in the country was able to take care of themselves without the need for government assistance. We worked hard, we played hard, and our seemingly boundless prosperity was inspiring for many other economies around the world. But things started to go downhill over the past few decades. We started to consume far more wealth than we produced, we shipped about 50 million good-paying jobs to foreign countries, we accumulated the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and we kept voting for politicians that did not care at all about the long-term future of this nation. Today, dependence on the government is at an all-time high, and that leaves millions of Americans in a very vulnerable position because we're at the precipice of the next great economic recession. Inequality is soaring. All of the gains from economic growth over the last half-century went to the top one percent of income earners, and incomes in the bottom half of the U.S. income distribution have actually declined when adjusted to the current inflation levels. Kaitlyn Henderson, senior research adviser at Oxfam America, highlighted that "it's shameful that at a time when many US companies are boasting record profits, some of the hardest working people in this country -- especially people who keep our economy and society functioning -- are struggling to get by and falling behind." On the same note, according to Allison Sesso, executive director of RIP Medical Debt, a nonprofit organization that buys consumer debt from healthcare providers or aggregators for pennies on the dollar, “the system is rigged against the American worker. Medical debt is uniquely American and it’s a by-product of the broken financing of our healthcare system. The majority of medical debt is owned by people who don’t have the money to pay for it,” Sesso explained. These are incredibly hard times for millions of us - and as opposed to what some say, most people are not in such distressing situations because they want to. Rather, they are victims of our long-term economic decline. The downfall of our system has just begun, and the next recession is going to unleash widespread financial suffering in our country. As we enter that time, we will need a whole lot more empathy and compassion than we are exhibiting right now. Everything is falling apart at the seams in our nation, and life in America is about to change in an irreversible manner. The numbers we're about to share with you are staggering, and you probably fit into one of these categories or faced some of these challenges yourself. Here are 20 Signs That American Families Are Being Economically Destroyed. For more info, find us on: https://www.epiceconomist.com/ And visit: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/
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